Hebrews 4:12 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Hebrews 4:12

Comments

The lusts and the thoughts and the intentions: what is that all about? It is all about being convicted of your sin, and God searching you and showing you your need of forgiveness.Obviously, the fact that the word of God is living means it is never out of date. If people say to us, ‘Why don't the churches get up-to-date with moral liberalism? Why don't we accept how society is changing? Why don't we jettison the old morality and adopt the new so-called morality?’, the answer is, because the word of God is alive. Its truth and all its teaching continues. It is God's design, his blueprint; it is his order and direction for society. The more mankind moves away from it and the more society says, we reject it and we will make it legal and proper to do the opposite of what it says, the more chaos and heartache will come into society. These old truths in the moral standards of the word never pass away or grow out of date. The way of salvation will never be revised. But it is a living word because it is applied by the Spirit too. Here it is: print on paper the pages of a book. Yes, but its message is alive because it is applied to hearts and minds by the Holy Spirit of God. There is no human literature like it. Yes, some human literature has some small power to move us superficially, but you cannot read anything which transforms you and remakes your character and your entire worldview like this word of God. The Spirit of God applies it to hearts so that it gives rise to life. One moment we are dead in spirit, far from God, cut-off from him, and our souls are not functioning; we cannot effectively pray or relate to God. But then, because this word works in our lives and brings us to Christ, we obtain life. We are regenerated, our souls are alive and in touch with the living God. This word is called the living word because it imparts life. Of course, it is the Spirit who imparts life, but he does it through the word of God. This book has an energy which will never diminish while time endures. We read the Scripture; we hear it preached. It somehow takes hold of our apathy and shakes it and strikes us like nothing else we have heard. It subdues our hatred for God and spiritual things, and it humbles us, taking away our prejudices by its power. Before conversion, I read the word of God with all my reservations as though I am waiting for somebody to come and prove all this to me. But nobody is supplied to me, and yet as I read, it just becomes so obvious to me. It is the self-authenticating word of God. ‘Piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit’, reaching innermost parts of the life and of the joints and unseen motives, unaccepted hitherto guilty deeds, and it lays us bare so that we see ourselves as God sees us. And it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, the plans and the lusts. It's like a magistrate; it has got right inside us so that we can see ourselves. That is the word of God, scrutinising us.

Application

You see people who come to Christ and are converted and sometimes they are proud people, people who never said sorry to anybody about anything, and who would never acknowledge that they have done anything wrong in their entire lives – they are so self-righteous. Then they read the word of God and suddenly they come to say, ‘I see myself here; this is me; I am the condemned person.’ The word of God comes home to them; it convicts them, and they must have the forgiveness of God.

What are so called Christian churches doing, legislating concerning how they should be run, how they will worship, whether they will have the women priests or bishops, whether they will support this or that or gay clergy or anything else? What are mere men doing trying to determine how these things should be, when God has revealed all his truth? This Bible is directed and authoritative, and as the Reformers and the great Puritans used to say, everything we need to know we decide by the Scripture. We bring all spiritual matters to the absolute rule of Scripture. It is our perfect authority and it is all-sufficient for all questions of faith and life, so here is the Scripture and its integrity.

Here is a Sunday School teacher, and he or she has been asked to do a special message for the children in one of the departments. ‘What I am going to do’, they say, ‘is to give a story and it will have the gospel in it and I’ll try to ensure that it will be a message to bring people to salvation. I am going to use a story because I think it is much better for the children and easier for their understanding.’ No, don’t do that: there is plenty in the word of God. Use the word of God; give yourself a text. Certainly illustrate it, but this word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. The mind of God is infinitely better than my mind; he knows what he's doing, far, far better than I do. Certainly do not use drama and some people are doing that. We need to get people weeping and crying or moved, so we will go in for films and drama. The so-called Christian evangelistic film industry is so corrupt and so awful. It involves the corruption of the gospel, the dumbing down, and the absence of conviction of sin that means we should have nothing to do with it.

Do you use the word of God? Are you down, are you low in spirits? Well, you are bound to be from time to time. Go to the word of God; choose different passages and read them. Shut everything out and read the word of God, and that will warm your heart and bring you back to the Lord and lift you in your spirits. Pause every now and then and reflect on what you read, and thank God for it. Thank God for what he did for those people, thank God for the promises that are implied by the passage. Read some of the great records of God strengthening and enabling his people, some of the great promise passages; the word of God will lift up your heart.

Questions

The word of God is technically remarkable; no doubt about that. The more we study it, the more we are amazed at its technical excellence: its structure, its components. Although it was given by inspiration over very many years, using so many different inspired authors, the more you study it the more you are amazed at the evidence for the single authorship: the authorship of God, the Word, the Son of the living God. This was never something compiled by a multiplicity of people. You see the unity of message throughout. You see Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, its principal theme, by promise and prophecy, by the record of his coming and his work, by the doctrines of the New Testament Church, by the testimony to the power of the risen Lord and his continuing life and government of his church. It is easy to prove that all the doctrines of that most complex and profound letter to the Romans written by the apostle Paul; all those same doctrines are present in the earliest books of the Bible given by inspiration to Moses, in the book of Genesis. It has a unified message, and a perfect construction: the portion of it that is doctrine, the portion of it which is the history of God's work, the portion of it which teaches how to experience the Lord and walk with him, the portion of it which gives us the words of the thoughts and the themes and the manner for praise and worship. It is consistent, and its accuracy wonderfully vindicated things that appear in the early parts of the Bible, which many cynics purse their lips at and doubted. They have doubted its literal history and its facts, and then the sands of the east have yielded to archaeological enquiry and the monuments of the records have been unearthed that have proved the error of the experts, and the accuracy of the biblical record.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Hebrews 4:12 Commentary and Bible Study